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Why is there a B in DOUBT? - THE MEN WHO RUINED ENGLISH SPELLING
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- Опубликовано: 12 авг 2024
- Why is there a B in DOUBT? Why does RECEIPT have a P in it? And what's with the B in DEBT?
The answers to these questions will surprise and infuriate you all at the same time.
This video tells the story of the men (and let’s face it, they were men) who ruined the spelling of many English words. Among them: doubt, receipt, debt, island, isle, aisle, subtle & indict.
Watch and all will become clear.
===
This is part of my series about silent letters in English.
Subscribe to my channel for lots more about the quirks of the language. And please follow me on twitter while you’re at it: / robwordsyt
==CHAPTERS==
0:00 - Into
0:34 - Doubt & receipt
1:01 - Whose fault is it?
1:24 - The reason
1:59 - The B in debt
2:28 - The B in doubt
2:39 - Subtle, plumber & aisle
2:45 - Revelation about the S in isle & island
3:20 - Conclusion
Actually, silent 'B' and 'K' were added to many words to make them score more in Scrabble . Similarly, we need to add silent Q to words, so 'back' becomes 'bacque'
more points in scrabble is the only reason i will accept for lots of silent letters
i did it with my name. its not spelled "mack" but "macq." and, no, the "q" isn't silent. the q in macq is no more silent than the k in mack.
Utter Bollocks, or should that be Bollox?
@@cjmacq-vg8um how about mackqueauxeaur for a gigantic solemn silence after your name, one that would make any typesetter shudder?
@@milanstevic8424 ... it would make my brain shudder too. you have it written with a "k" and a "q." a little redundant i'm afraid. thanks but i think i'll stick with my spelling. a lot of people use the word "mac" or "mack." i'm the only one to spell it "macq."
As a non-native speaker, I often do pronounce those silent letters by accident, wrongly assuming other people not doing so could perhaps be a dialectal variation, later to realise that it's just how the English language works.
Most other languages have a stronger connection between phonetics and orthography. English has way too many arbitrary rules like "add this silent letter to look more fancy/Latin-like".
@Lucky Joestar Yes, great意思，但是also该有多大weird 办法s，也 a mix的both。这样，你就该学limited汉字s也latin字s。
/s
English is fucked up; I blame French most of the time.
@Lucky Joestar Is Romanji at least used in a consistent way of representing the Japanese language?
Also German had such a fancy period. E.g. the y in Bayern (Bavaria) and Meyer (Surname) is purely aesthetic, while in Steyr (City in Austria) it is from actual Latin "Styria" via "Styra".
In German there is also the 'ie' which represents the long 'i' (English 'ee') with the intention of looking like the Alemannic-Bavarian/Middle High German 'ie/ia' diphthong and hence forcing a continuation from Middle High German that doesn't exist. E.g. compare Bavarian 'Liacht', "i siach", "Schmid", "(P)fluign" and "khriacha", to German "Licht", "ich sehe", "Schmied", "Fliege" and "kriechen" ("light" , "I see" , "fly" and "crouching/creeping").
And then there is the thing with the v, which can either be pronouced like f in Germanic words or like w (English v) in words of Latin and Greek origin.
@Lucky Joestar Except the different readings change the meaning and are solely there for that reason and also poetry. Well, not that you would get it.
I'm French and studied linguistic in university and we learned that the same thing happened to the French language! In the middle ages words were spelled like they were pronounced so for example "longtemps" (a long time) was spelled lontan.
BUT then the Renaissance happened and with it a revival of interest for ancient Rome and Latin in Italy, which increased the soft power of Italy making the Italian language, culture and lifestyle very popular in France (apparently young nobles added Italian words to their sentences to sound cool the same way nowadays young people of non English speaking countries add English words to their speech).
And French scholars saw this rise of Italian culture and that trend of going back to ancient roots and thought oh let's do that too with the French language!
So the French Renaissance started and they went back to Latin and did exactly what you said in this video.
Like, they realised that words like "lontan" came from Longus Tempus and they thought "oh we must show off the Latin roots so let's write it longtemps but we say that the g, p and s are silent so that people can continue to pronounce it as usual."
But they didn't stop there, they thought "Italians went back to Latin roots, we're gonna do even better! We're gonna go back further in time to ancient Greek! And how did the Greeks spell the sound f ? they wrote ph ! So now when you need to buy medication you don't go to the farmacie, you go to the PHARMACIE !! You don't study filosofie, you study PHILOSOPHIE !! Take that Italians!!!"
And that's just a few example of all the spelling changes that were done to the French language.
And that's why nowadays French is written so weirdly and everyone who tries to learn French has a mental breakdown trying to figure out the pronunciation of everything.
I wondered why so many words with a 'f' sound were spelt with 'ph'. We have this problem in English too.
French is still much easier to read than English. Yes there are silent consonants in some words (almost always terminating consonants without following vowels), but at least vowel sounds are consistent unlike in English.
@@bkdarkness that's interesting, where are you from?
@@Cloudipy canada
@@bkdarkness if you are a native French speaker, yes. But if you learn French as a second language and you are for example Chinese or Japanese and you discover that E + A + U is pronounced "O".... 😂😅
Thank you for this. As a non native English speaker I have struggled all my life with spoken as well as written forms of English. The word "Debt" is a triggering one for me as my English teacher had mocked, ridiculed and severely punished me in front of the whole class for pronouncing it wrong.. of course with the cute little "B". The 14 year old non English speaking me was traumatised, but gladly I never ended up hating the English language, literature or culture.
Most teachers are useless academics who couldn't get a real job. They know this and take their envy and self loathing out on their pupils.
That's messed up
Sounds like you had a really crappy teacher. But without a doutte, your English looks perfect now 😀
your english teacher should be fired
I was born speaking English and many of us almost pronounce the b, just the tiniest bit.
We also have "debit cards" not Debt cards.
I lay 100% of the blame at the feet of the group of dictionary writers in the 1800s who standardized spelling and could have gone with whichever spelling they wanted, but chose these spellings. Until that point, spelling was not standardized and you could spell thing in various ways, some more phonetic than others.
Yew kan stil spelle werds houeva yew lyke. Thair arrarnt enny grammer puhleece wot iz gonna giv mee ah fyne forr speling mye werds lyke thiss. Norr eeven stopp mee frum dooing itt weareva ande wenneva iye pleez.
>
Mark Twain opined that it was a frightfully uncreative person who couldn't imagine more than one way to spell a word.
@@SeattlePioneer It does make you wonder why a few of the most common spellings couldn’t be included in the early modern dictionaries. It would have semi standardized spelling while still allowing some flexibility.
The fact 'Though' had been systematically re-spelt as 'Tho' gives me hope that eventually we will correct the unnecessarily stupid way of spelling things in time.
@@penismightier4303 the one time being Dyslexic made reading no harder for me than anyone else
"Salmon" is another one. It comes through Latin "salmo," meaning to leap, but by the time it got to English through French it was saumon or samon. Latin scholars put the L back. Oddly, the L is pronounced in "Salmonella" which is named after someone named Salmon. I have no idea if he pronounced the L in his name.
So the L in "salmon" is silent?
@@danyboy86 yes
@Prof. Spudd And is the L in "Solomon" silent as well? Serious question. This is quite hard for us non native english speakers, caus we think we are pronouncing right, but we generaly learn only from reading or listening to other non native english speakers.
Even though I know it's "incorrect", from earliest childhood i have always chosen to pronounce the "l" in "salmon", just because to me it sounds so much more elegant than "sammun". I also pronounce the "l" in "alms", "balm", "calm", "palm", and "psalm" because they sound better than "omz", "bomb", "cahm", "pom", and "sahm".
why Brits pronounce L in Solder, but not Americans ?
You somehow manage to make these linguistic topics, that would normally be interesting to a specific group of people, so interesting and appealing for all! Well done! Really nice work and presentation!
English is my 5th language . I'm using it the last 45 or so years mainly because I live in the US. For my brother, it was his 7th language. We both learned English well past our childhood or even teenage years. His business makes him to live and move around the world. When we talk to each other obviously we use our mother tongue. However, anytime we need to SOLVE some problem to a conclusion we seamlessly quite often in the middle of the sentence switch to English, not even thinking about it. Then when we reach an agreeable conclusion we finish the conversation back in our native language. Weirdest thing. Wonder if you can have some outlook to this phenomenon Rob. I just found your channel and I'm impressed by the content.
The s in island had a disastrous consequence for me once. As a pupil in Germany, during a written exam in English, I confused insula in peninsula with island, without noticing, what I had written. The teacher was very happy to share the result with the whole class … .
I don't know which leader/dictator will have the balls to simplify languages and make them great again. German for one needs massive reformation. As a German, I can say many of our words are too long, difficult to pronounce and full of grammar nonsense like three the's (die, der, das) and noun genders.
@@DoodleDoo Grammatically yes, German needs some form of simplification because all I know about building sentences I learned from hearing my parents talk as a wee lad and not because of my extensive knowledge about the different cases and whatnot.
In my eyes, pronounciation is a completely different thing and I have to hard disagree with you there. The problem isnt that German is hard to pronounce, it's actually super straight forward with the exception of a few words and words we borrowed from other languages. What's getting in the way of proper pronounciation when learning German are often the little rules, like silent letters, other languages have when it comes to that part of speaking a language.
We barely have any of those rules, there are some, yes, but they don't get as much in the way when learning how other languages are pronounced as much as it does the opposite way. Hence why the French have comparatively much more trouble with pronouncing other languages, even other Roman languages.
That's a more extreme example but the same goes for most other languages too. Obviously the German accent is a thing and many people keep it despite their extensive knowledge in other languages but statistically it is much more likely that we understand how a word is supposed to be pronounced in English or Spanish even if actually saying it might be a bit rough at times.
@@RallenCaptura I don't care how hard you disagree because most Germans I talked to also agreed that German is unnecessarily complicated and needs to be simplified like English.
😂
What a dick move
The rule of "don't end a sentence with a preposition" also comes from scholars of that time. One day, a scholar sat down and suddenly thought 'Wait, Latin doesn't end sentences with a prepositions while English does. But Latin is the superior language, so English shouldn't.'
It sounds absurd but it's true.
@@erictrombini8519 Wait a moment, you could say something like "vado scholam ad"? I mean, a preposition is put (position) in front (pre) of the noun, so how could you have a legitimate sentence ending in an preposition? Could you give a real-world example?
Oh, so that's where the rule came *_from!_*
I say we throw them out.
@@erictrombini8519 Case and declension are one thing, but frankly there are (were) too many forms of Latin on which to base controlling, authoritative rules -- particularly with regard to syntax, word forms and grammar -- so the scholars who assert the superiority of a particular approach need to explain why and how the period and register they've selected as "superior" establishes the proper grammatical form. Otherwise, I consider them suspect.
Yet IMO it's still always wrong to end a sentence in Latin with a preposition.
Came here from search after some comments on DW. Learned something new. Subscribed! 💚
You have a great comments section, as well! 🍀✌️😎
As a Thai, this is somewhat similar to how we anglicize names to English in ways that would preserve the words' Sanskrit roots.
A prime example would be Suvarnabhumi Airport. It's pronounced "Suwannapoom" but written (both in Thai and English orthography) in a way that reflects its etymological roots.
Addendum: Now that I think more of it, even the way we write a lot of proper nouns in Thai is very Sanskrit-influenced as well. Thai words have a ton of orthographic oddities and silent letters and we are just used to them.
Yeah I was thinking about this as well while watching the video. It's very similar to Thai.
I found that when I was living in Thailand for two years, especially in place names. "Nakhon Si Thammarat" represents Sanskrit "Nagar Sri Dharma Raja" and the Thai spelling is closer to the Sanskrit than to the Thai pronunciation.
Thai spelling can be difficult to learn for a native English speaker ;-) I have read that the Thais are proud of the Sanskrit roots of much of the language, so that certain letters of Sanskrit origin are left in, although phonemically they are redundant.
As an Indian able to speak Hindi and Marathi, we would pronounce Suvarnabhumi as - (soo-were-na-bhoo-me)
"land of gold", "Golden land" would be the rough translation.
Poor Thai people. Native English speakers feel your pain.
I found this video very interesting. and sent it on to my English-teacher mother. She liked it too, but replied that the examples in the videos do have related words where the so-called silent letters are pronounced. Receipt - Reception, Doubt - Dubious. Another example not in this video is Bomb - Bombard. Maybe the letters were added to make morphological families more obvious?
Well it depends on the root. If English started using it from French rather than directly from Latin... etc
This is nonsense, we latvieši dont add any silent letters to show that audzināt (raise) comes from the root augt (grow) and yet we all know it does.
Gunars, your entire existence is nonsense.
The ignorance in all Rob's videos were not so blatant like in this video and certainly it's not a bliss.
That was indeed the case for phlegm. The silent “g” there makes the sudden appearance in “phlegmatic” to be less … weird and confusing and arbitrary-seeming. Although, many people now pronounce phlegmatic without the g anyway though…
In Old and Modern Catalan which is in the same family as French and Spanish (and is spoken in the regions between Spain proper and France), the "b" and "p" in "doubt", "subtle", and "receipt" still appear terminal as in _dubta,_ _subtil,_ and _recepta._
One of my brothers used to work in tech support, and tried to make a list of unhelpful letter enunciation aids, like "G as in gnome", "T as in tsunami", "K as in knight", or my favorite: "E as in eye".
Scary that the English language is so helpful with this type of mischief.
to be fair, the t in tsunami was a result of directly loaning "tsunami" from japanese, in which, japanese people do indeed pronounce the t in tsunami
This was a big part of my childhood. I loved math and science because those made logical sense. I hated language classes because none of my teachers were able to explain why these stupid things are done.
@ColonelRuiz These things are not stupid, but your teachers were. Or: more ignorant then stupid. If they would just tell you that English language is Latin that's lazily pronounced, would it help? They could also add the fact that you can understand all European languages: Roman, German & Slav once you know Latin (or English spelling) - well, except Hungarian and Finnish. They could open window of understanding so many languages to kids, but they didn't. I really wonder WHY?
Yeah English is a mess. It's such an inefficient language.
@@2m7b5 I am not sure I would describe it as inefficient, however the unique part about English is that it has the ability to describe nearly everything with incredible finesse and specificity. Add to that, that whenever there is some other language that has a useful word English absorbs it. Language is a creation of the culture it comes from and it reflects the culture that uses it. The English were curious, creative metaphorical and yet rational thinkers with a penchant for exploration and colonization. The English language is the same. Does it suffer in efficiency in comparison to a language that is very blunt and simplistic? Yes! But it gain a lot with those inefficiencies.
@@tazika2988 It's like bringing back the dead and turn it to a zombie!
If native English speakers find it irritable to have a language which is not based on logic and reasoning, then what more it is to the non-natives. I have learned Chinese. Contrary to what many English speakers are saying, I find that Chinese is much more logical and easier to learn.
They did it in France, too. The Latin word for twenty was viginti. In Old French, it was vint. French scholars made it vingt for much the same reason as English scholars perpetrated the annoyances that are the bane of every English learner.
A famous example is also "sçavoir" as an early modern spelling of savoir (to know). But this was eventually rolled back and we only remember that as a joke: those people thought that savoir came from scio/scire while it actually came from sapio/sapere, which obviously has no "c" (the etymology is pretty clear if you just have a look at the Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan and then the Italian form, with Occitan seating indecise in the middle).
same with 'doigt (DWAH): finger' which was spelt just 'doi', but then the extra letters were added to make it look more like digitus, the Latin word for finger.
@@keedt At least the 't' is somewhat useful, and used to be pronounced in some dialects (for 'vingt' it is even still pronounced in some northern varieties of modern French). It's the 'g' which makes no sense: it disappeared between classical Latin and low Latin, so that no Romance language have it, not even Sardinian.
@@julienf2301 don't forget about Romanian.😉 Un deget.
Addendum: the 't' in 'vingt-et-un' or in 'vingt élèves' is pronounced everywhere, is it not? Liaisons which make the 't' of doigt appear don't exist as far as I can tell (in standard French).
@@keedt Ahah, you got me, I forgot one Romance language. But that's the weird kid of the family.
Regarding the "liaisons": indeed you're right again, the silent 't' often makes a comeback in the liaison, although I'm not fully sure whether I would naturally say "vin-T-élèves" or "vin-Z-élèves". For doigt, I had to scratch my head to search for examples and eventually I found one where the t preceedes a vowel. In the expression "au doigt et à l'oeil", no one would never make a liaison with a pronounced t, it would just sound weird.
Where the t of doigt is more useful is in derived words such as in "avoir du doigté".
Great - a lovely video which I can use with my English language students, who find this bewildering. Understanding why something is the case makes it easier to remember. The graphics, illustrations, and the fact he speaks very clearly means that it is accessible even to B2 level, maybe even B1 students could handle this. Also the length of the video - not too long for in-class use. Perfect.
It's interesting how the silent letters have this history. My focus is currently on the Korean language. The pronunciation of Hangul is a challenge for anyone trying to learn, but the Hangul pronunciation is generally more consistent than English especially when it comes to silent letters.
It may be interesting to note that the S in isle, in a way, is still there in French. French dropped quite some S's back in the day and replaced them with accents circonflexe (those little hoods on a vowel). So estre became "être" and isle became "île". Same for côte, forêt, hôpital and others. In the case of those last three examples, English did retain the S in spelling and pronunciation, though (coast, forest and hospital, obviously.)
He made a video about your last point
Long time french speaker, and now that I read this comment I'm telling myself WHY THE HELL I NEVER NOTICED THIS!!!! 🤣🤣
@@ilyasovich I told a French friend this and he wasn't aware of it. He had not been taught at school about the circumflex replacing 's'.
@@enterprise1954 Usually I'm good at spotting this kind of little things, but this one, I never noticed it
An 's' is far better than a circumflex.
Plombier has the b pronounced in French. Plomb is the French word for lead, from which water pipes were unfortunately once fabricated. Also the French word île as a circumflex accent above the 'i' to indicate that there was once a letter 's' in the pronunciation. Hence 'hôpital' was once pronounced in French just as it is in English, with the s sound.
The latin word "Plumbum" being the root of the french word and also where the chemical symbol Pb comes from.
The silent letters are actually extremely important in my opinion, for example the word doubt is etymologically the equivalent of “double think”. I think there’s a point where etymological respect is better in the long run.
I tutor a young girl and every week she brings a new spelling list from school. Most of this week’s list looks like it came straight out of your video, so I think we will start the lesson by watching your video so that when she gets frustrated, she will know that it is not because she’s silly and she will know who’s to blame. Thank you.
Amazing. As a second-gen American I was the chief translator for many a visitor and had to answer all kinds of questions about the peculiarities of English. I was pretty good about some of my explanations, but I had no idea about the root of this one!
what a nice discovery. I love the English language since i was a little boy, and since back in Portugal, movies are not dubbed but subtitled, English has been present thought out the years. Thank you for these pearls. New subscriber. Note: I fully understand the relation between French and English since i speak a bit of both, so its really nice to see these little details that mean and tell so much about a language and the History o those countries.
Watching this video I now fully appreciate the DUMB LUCK we had in the Croatian language, which was unfortunately castrated in the 1830's by a fellow named Ljudevit Gaj.
He decided to undertake a language reform (to counter Hungarian becoming official after Latin stopped being so) and had chosen one particular form of Croatian, namely Shtokavian, as a basis. In doing this he ignored the other two main forms actually spoken by the majority, namely Chakavian and Kaikavian, and they are now not used in any media or schooling, thus rendered into "local old people accents".
One might think, well yes, we had to choose one so even if any of the other two had gotten chosen the same would happen bu now to Shtokavian. The problem though was also that the same fellow Gaj was not a native Croatian speaker at all! In his home they spoke GERMAN, only his mother used Kaikavian (!) talking to the household staff or neighbours...
Gaj himself was a very vain man that constantly tried to prove his "nobility" and failing to do so decided to reform the language. The problem was, he was a bad law student and had absolutely no linguistic education. Did that deter him? Of course it didn't as he was vain as a peacock, writing the proposed reform in ONE year of "linguistic" study!
What then happened is that, since Shtokavian is much much closer to Serbian than either Kaikavian or Chakavian were, the Prince of Serbia Milan Obrenović saw a great opportunity to put a wedge between Croats and Hungarians/Germans binding them to Serbs, and invested a lot of money to Gaj's project, his printing press.
Thus, with funds galore and his printing press on, Gaj managed to persuade the blind Croatian nobility and quasi intellectuals that Shtokavian is Croat and Croat is Shtokavian. He even invented an "Illyrian" root as a common south Slavic root, calling the people that identified themselves "Croat" as actually Magyars!
You might think now where is that dumb luck I mentioned? All this above seems pretty bad... Well, one thing that he did correctly (sic?) is that he accepted the main rule of spelling as you pronounce (which the Serbs used too, only in Cyrillic) and THAT is the sheer dumb luck that makes writing in Croatian easy as a pie (although the language itself is very hard to master).
BTW the Serbian language reformer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić also used the "write as you speak" rule, but he was NOT a friend of Prince Milan at all...
A fascinating read, thank you!
How very interesting. Similar things have happened in other countries where the language of one region became the standard. In England, the southern Middle English spoken in the triangle of London (capital) and Oxford and Cambridge (universities) became the standard. In France, Parisian French did, with northern French (the language of "oui" for "yes") prevailing. The southern French language of "oc" for "yes," which actually gave the name of the area, Languedoc, lost out, as did the separate Provencal language. I read a post just a few days ago on a site with a number of Scandinavians commenting, that said a particular dialect of western Norway was chosen for the standard when the country finally gained its independence. But I think in most cases this was either a consensus decision or just an evolution, not the decision of one guy with an inflated ego!
@@elainechubb971 well it was a "consensus" decision as a final decision, but that one guy's work tilted the scale towards Shtokavian so heavily that it stuck.
This is the distribution of the 3 dialects now:
hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavsko_narje%C4%8Dje#/media/Datoteka:Croatian_dialects.PNG
Bosnia (the white empty space in the middle) is wholly Shtokavian thus green not white ;)
and this was at the start of 16th century, before the migrations:
hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavsko_narje%C4%8Dje#/media/Datoteka:Loncaric_historical_borders_of_kaikavian_dialect.png
@@RobWords you're welcome! Thank you for the awesome channel!
@@RobWords funny thing is that at present times you often come up to discussions about the very existence of the Croatian language. Usually it is Croats/Montenegrins/Bosniaks claiming they have an original language, and Serbs claiming it is all Serbian language (or Serbo-Croatian as it used to be called during Yugoslavia). The discussion doesn't even care about linguistic issues, it becomes a political issue right on.
I, as a Croat, actually am in a minority among Croatians when I do admit we do not have a Croat language any more, since we "merged" it into the Serbo-Croatian and managed to render our original specific language dialects (which are much more different than Serbian, bordering unintelligible) quite close to extinct. In a generation or max two there shall (very unfortunately) be no more native speakers of these dialects if we continue this way.
There is an island off the west coast of Scotland called Islay, pronounced /aye-la/. This befell the same case of adding letters. In Scottish Gaelic it is called Ìle, and throughout history it has had many different spelling variations including Ili, Yla, and Ilay. It wasn't until the early 19th century that an 's' was added to make it seem more similar to the word 'island'!
Excellent whisky there!👍
Haha I'm reading this from Islay, it's inane
@@alkante2962 Just what I wanted to say!
Don't mention Rhum....
@@dougaltolan3017 Why? Is that its reputation really?
These videos are so helpful for my Dyslexic students who often express their frustration with English spelling. Great videos !
Amazing! I really thought that at some point of time these silent letters were actually pronounced !! For example Carlisle, which is same as Carlyle but is tricky to pronounce unless you already know how to say it.
I'm an English teacher out in Vietnam and my students always ask me why we have so many silent letters in our words so this series is superb.
If you teach in Thailand they won't ask that question. Thai spelling is full of silent letters especially in loan words of Sanskrit origin. A hint from a former fellow teacher: Thai, like Vietnamese, is tonal. My Thai students tended to get the stressed syllables wrong in English because they were unfamiliar with the idea of stressed syllables coming from a language that is mainly monosyllabic. But I noticed that some of their tones resembled (to me) English stresses so I asked them, as an experiment, to listen for Thai tones in polysyllabic English words. They did, and it helped them to get the syllable stresses right.
Why can't you hear a pterodactyl urinate?. Because it's P is silent. Kid joke
Interesting. Etymology is fascinating.
However, no B in "doute" in French, but the letter is kept in "doubtful" => "dubitatif".
As well for dette : débiteur (debtor)
By my side, the good question is not why there is a b in those words, but why there is no more in French.
There was a S in île (island) in French too. But as you know, the ^ accent replace this old S. (btw, isla in Spanish)
Indubitably!
I'm thinking this video is hokum
@@hydorah OK, brainiac!
@@hydorah Now THAT (hokum) is an EXCELLENT word!!!
But in Spanish the s is pronounced. Like in Florida they have Islamorada pronounced “eeslah-more-ah-dah”
My elementary school taught reading/spelling using phonics. I have always been able to figure out how a word is spelled just by sounding it out. However, I can remember at a very early age thinking that whoever decided how some words should be spelled should get a swift kick in the pants. I still try to use those spelling rules: “ I before E except after P & sometimes W & Y” and so on. But those rules don’t alway work.
Let's just admire the fact that there were English scholars who thought that French derived words needed *more* silent letters
Thanks to those renaissance scholars that I found French easier to spell and read than English. At least, French is pretty more regular. In English, there are too many inconsistencies that the safest way to learn the pronunciation is by opening the dictionary by each new word you encounter. I'm not a native English speaker, and that is the pain we need to endure when we learn your language.
I studied French for seven years, and actually I think it's as complicated to spell as English. There are so many silent letters, for a start. Then there are the accents, which may have little to do with pronunciation but simply indicate where a letter has been dropped from a former spelling, such as the circumflex accent over the "e" in "foret," to show it used to be "forest." Then there's the fact that some words spelled similarly have diverged in pronunciation, such as ville, village.Sometimes a sound can be spelled with different letters--compare the "s" sound in sans (first "s") and cent! (Now, there are two simple words with tricky spellings.) I learned when doing the classroom exercises where the teacher slowly dictated a passage to us and we had to write it down correctly, even though some of the words would be unknown, that you could make a reasonable guess that could still be wrong. I grant that it may be a bit easier to read than English, but when you read a word you don't know, you may still be at a loss about how to pronounce it. It's certainly much harder than Italian and Spanish.
I think French and English both suffer from being two of the earliest languages in Europe to be written down, so spellings became fairly fixed while pronunciations was still changing considerably, meaning a correspondence between the written and spoken language. became strained.
I feel your pain and English is the only language I know.
@@elainechubb971 the monk scribes would sometimes draw the s of forest above the e in order to save paper as paper production was expensive. In time the ~ above the e became ê. In french family names such as Laforest the s kept its original spelling.
@@HepCatJack Thank you for your post--very interesting. I believe this sort of shortcut was quite common in the Middle Ages. The English (Anglo-Saxon) scribes used to draw a horizontal line above a vowel to stand for a following 'n" and if I remember aright, this lasted into the early modern period. I think they had similar ways of marking a "th" symbol (thorn or eth) as an abbreviation for "that (thaet)," and maybe "than." By the late Elizabethan age (if not earlier) a whole system of shorthand had been invented. Some early pirated editions of plays by Shakespeare (and probably other playwrights) were produced by men who surreptitiously took down the words in shorthand as they were spoken--like hiding a recording device in a concert venue nowadays, only less accurate! Writing systems got quite sophisticated quite early. And I wonder how future generations will think about the various techniques people who post on the Internet adopt to disguise their vocabulary and avoid being censored!
@@florencecousin5577 being an English speaker I have the opposite problem, I know the pronunciation, but on a an almost daily basis I find that I can't even convince my useless Android spell checker to latch onto the correct word! Fortunately I have a wife whose brain can 'mystically see' the correct spelling, often for a word she's never hear of!
I love it when both the video and the comment section are incredibly interesting and informative. Kudos to all!
This is a good thing. When the word has a spelling that ressembles its origin, the language becomes much easier for FOREIGNERS to learn! Maybe this is one of the reasons English became a unviersal language.
A Portuguese enthusiast Fernando Pessoa claimed Portuguese was a "perfect" universal language, but he blaimed the innovations in spelling, because it would become more difficult for foreigners to learn. At his time, pharmácia (pharmacy) changed into farmácia. He was totally against this kind of modernization.
Personally I don't find 'silent' letters irritating. For one thing, I don't know about anyone else, but when I really pay close attention to the way my mouth and tongue move when I speak, it becomes apparent that the silent letters make a noticeable, although admittedly barely noticeable, practical difference to my enunciation. Aesthetically, I kind of like that.
It’s quite interesting watching this as a Dutch speaker. We have the b and p in many of our cognates too, but only if they are actually pronounced:
receipt - recept (has a different meaning)
debt - debit (only used in the context of bookkeeping)
subtle - subtiel
and:
island - eiland
Dutch has had some similar interfering, though. For example, the difference between “hen” and “hun” (both translate to “them”) is completely artificial, and done in an attempt to make Dutch look more like Latin. Which means people now have to check if they’re using it in a dative (hun) or accusative case (hen), except when used after a preposition (hen). The fact that “hun” is also the possessive form (their) does not help at all.
And Dutch (and German) are actually the languages where England got the words from.
@@tobbiganz4215 They got it from saxon man
This is a bit unrelated but in German the pronouns for "she", "they" and "you" (polite form) are the same in nominative and accusative. There are other pronouns that simply coincide and you have to rely on context, but I find this all quite annoying sometimes. :/
In my native Bulgarian they are all different pronouns and it makes more sense to me.
same for german. Rezept, Debit (not commonly used), subtil and Insel.
The Island think confuses me until today. Because there is the island called Island and then there is the english word island for island, but spelled ai land.
And those words are Latin and came to Dutch via lower German/Saxonian. And did not lose the B/P in their journey, where as in French it got silent and eventually lost them. Old and Middle English is a mixture with close ties to saxonian, but I suppose any spelling was not fixed until very late in time.
As a Norwegian I always pronounce silent letters in English. Its fun and sounds hillarious.
as a joke? it would be quite weird if all the silent letters are suddenly pronounced xd
Yeah I definitely use “Skissors” and it drives my wife crazy
I like your attitude.
Doesn't Norwegian have a lot of barely pronounced Gs and things? I figured maybe that's same root as some of our Gs that are unprpnounced?
Like 'Heugesund' i heard ev-ge-sun? Or sognefjord is 'song' with the letters backwards and more of an unprpnounced G
As an English person I wouldn't dare try to pronounce anything in Norwegian. Be afraid to summon something :P
Your videos are so interesting. Thanks for sharing. I love learning the origin of words and phrases.
I am Korean and have studied English for more than 40 years Finally I come to understand why. . Interesting!
One thing though, Korean scholars are periodically changing the way Korean words are spelled to match the modern changes in the language. Why isn't this the case with English? There are confusions of course but higher literacy does mean a lot of things you know. .
Thank you! Late in life I have taken up writing. I was the worst speller in my year at school but my English teacher said I had the best comprehension. The only way I finally taught myself to read, aged around 9 or 10, was by word recognition.
I have lately become interested in the roots of English. I find all of it fascinating, especially as I come from one of the Danish Ruled boroughs.
And yes, I have often suspected the same people who sometimes look down on people struggling with its idiosyncrasies, probably created this mess in the first place.
Be proud of yourself! And cherish any dialect forms you have in your vocabulary, because they keep a variety of "Englishes" alive in a world where a bland uniformity in language and culture can get very boring. I've inherited odd words and phrases from family in or with ancestors in (among other places) London, Lincolnshire, the Midlands (where my aunt worked, becoming fascinated by the local idioms), and Wiltshire, I think. I imagine most people have similar stories.
Seeing words written before the letter insertions I find really difficult to mentally read , takes me quicker to read a whole sentence as one with letter shapes to known words than go word by word in something printed from Chaucer
@@highpath4776 Just a tip for pronouncing those "DouBtful words:
1. Please don't pronounce the alphabet that comes immediately after the vowel. For example, douBt. ReceiPt.iSland
2. When two consonants come together, leave the first one. For example, Knight, Psychology.
Hope these tips might be helpful for non native english speakers. It would be highly appreciated if you please share any other tips. Thanks.
I've heard the hardest part of English is not all the silent letters, it is actually the inconsistent vowel sounds. We have like 14 of them represented by 5 and 1/2 letters, and maybe 20+ combos. Russian vowels carry one sound per letter, (except O sometimes) and there are no combos.
And E sometimes. And not just sometimes, all the time when it's not stressed. Also almost half of the vowels carry an additional "j" in front of them unless they go after a consonant in which case they just make it softer. But I agree all of these can be formalized as rules, whereas in English there's no logical way to explain why "creature" and "create" are pronounced differently, one just needs to remember it.
I've been on a disorganized campaign of one to bring on the "schwa," the upsidedown "e" that stands for the "uh" sound so common in American English.
As both a linguist and an ardent follower of world politics, I found that your videos here are far more fascinating than your works in DW. Thanks for producing them!
French scholars did this too. Isle is an example of that (the hat over the I represents an s). Vingt for twenty is like the S in island - it is a false back form from latin.
The circumflex in French was introduced in the 1600s to replace the ‘s’ as I recall, by which time words such as « crest, coast » had already come into English from Norman French with the ‘s’ still there. The ‘b’ in doubt comes from Renaissance scholars too, as does the fake etymology of ‘poids’ (thought to be from ‘perdre’, but probably from ‘pesum’) The ‘u’ and the ‘l’ are clearly from French scribe traditions where a script ‘u’ replaces an ‘l’ or an ‘ls’, as in ‘chevaux’. I love this subject. Spent hours on it, sorry! In fact in the 13th C French was pretty phonetic, and then was messed up by « scholars » in the Renaissance just like English.
Silent Letters have the useful benefit of relating to words of similar origin and/or meaning that still use the letters:
Debt | Debit
Sign | Signal
Receipt | Recipient
That's a great way to see things
Why do those words need to be spelt similarly though? It's not like it's hard to understanding that they're related.
@@beatrix1120 But with similar spelling it's more vivid and it's easier to memorize.
The g in sign is not silent, it just a soft g.
@@Carewolf That's not universally true. In many American English dialects, the "g" in "sign" is completely silent. When spoken, "sign" and "sine" are indistinguishable.
You're the guy from DW that has the Princeton finance/econ guru on. Love you guys!
Good one! Please make another one on pronunciation on how Latin origin words are spoken wrongly/differently in English.
I like your style and your take. I am a professional linguist, and on top of it also an academic and a scholar AND I fully endorse your disdain for my profession.
To me, English is relatively normal because I have had to learn it at school since age 5, but I have met a lot of German-speaking people who think English spelling is crazy!
The more I look at English, the more bewildering I find it. But it would be a shame if it were any other way!
English spelling is hell. German spelling is better but it's close to hell :) I'm a Russian and we pronounce every letter we write. There are several exceptions but they are minor. When I was a child I saw a game on TV where children spell every word. I thought what a stupid game. You just have to pronounce sounds and they are letters. When I started to learn English I understood that for English the game makes sense :)
Old german joke : How to speak ,Wie bitte'?- Hä?
@@user-lt4kh9ot1y But certain Russian words also have letters that we usually don't pronounce (like the T in Russian word for stairs "лестница" - les(t)nitza). But Russian has strong root words in grammatics that we knowing, so it saves the situation.
I agree as non native speaker myself, the spelling is insane mess, it's pretty much a like logography, you have to memorize how every single word is spelled and it's not an easy task, I've speaking English for 20 years and I still don't know how to spell some words, let alone misspelling some other words I know how to spell all the time.
Mr. Words, you are undoubtedly my favorite You Tuber.
I am forever in your debt.
Very, very interesting. Merci beaucoup !
I always thought that plumber came fairly directly from Latin as one who works with lead (plumbum). Just as we call a construction weight for finding vertical a "plumb bob" since they were often weighted with lead, though these days they are normally simply steel or brass.
Otherwise known as a plumb line
@@susettemclachlan8765 A plumb line is the string used to hang a plumb bob, but it is also used as a compound term for a plumb line and plumb bob together.
@@ononearts You are right. I had never known what the lead weight - the plumb bob - was called because we always called it a plumb line
What I thought too
You are correct. In French that person is a plombier. We should call them a plum-ber. Also, lazy tongue comes into it.
Plumber comes from the latin word plumbum meaning the chemical element "lead." The Romans made the first water pipes from lead and we still use the initials Pb in the Periodic Table of the Elements and resulting chemical "equations" to denote "lead." (e.g., PbSO4 denotes Lead-Sulfate) This should not however lead you to confuse lead (as in a pencil, actually Carbon) with lead as "lead a horse to water." "B"-ware.
Pencils containing carbon are somewhat uncommon, then usually in combination with graphite. Most use graphite or a combination of graphite and clay binder.
@@ArayStrak bro graphite is carbon
@@goatmeal5241 Different allotrope, kinda like how diamond has slight differences.
@@ArayStrak "carbon" is however not the name of an allotrope, it's the name of the element. Graphite is carbon, diamond is carbon, amorphous carbon is carbon.
anyway, the reason why pencils have a "lead" core is because people actually called graphite "black lead". lead is a similarly soft metal and chemistry back then was immature enough to actually consolidate its nomenclature. basically: pencil lead was already confused with lead, no need to warn people nowadays, it was already done ages ago and it obviously won't go away.
I have created a minimalistic french spelling system. Unfortunately, most traces of it have disappeared from the Internet but it's all there, stored neatly in my brain!
Latin was a language of prestige and had its influence. Compare with our current situation, english is one of the most highly regarded languages, and now it has its influence on other languages, it's felt everywhere.
As a homeschool parent, I so appreciate this video! When teaching certain spellings, there’s always the question of, “Why is that letter there? Why is it silent?” Followed by, “Well that’s dumb”.
Now I can just blame the old renaissance scholars. 😏
Thank you! I will be saving this video for our next spelling venture! 😊
Yes, it's kinda dumb... But kinda makes sense when thinking of other related words, like dubious, the b is there, and its true in French too. Like dette / débit. I won't get into each and every one because I think it should be (especially when teaching) make into a fun game : '' Can you find a related word that helps you remember that pesky silent letter'' ?
Sounds like you need a qualified teacher for the homeschooling.
Hilarious pun using "dumb" with its silent b! Note that when adding -y it's spelled "dummy" not *"dumby".
.
But then there is "dumbo"!
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But the b is silent again in "dumbass"!
@@mikemondano3624 Sounds like this person IS a qualified homeschool teacher.
And since I work with many "qualified" teachers, and I am one also, this problem comes up every time you teach spelling to kids who refuse to just accept nonsense.
Year what about that b in dumb and dumber?
Had no idea plumber/plumbing came to us from Old French and had already lost the "B" - I just always assumed that it came direct from Latin due to the whole Plumb from Plumbum (Lead) thing. Cheers for yet another informative video.
I doubt this to be true. The word for plumber in modern French is "plombier", with the B clearly pronounced.
@@bornhoffer and the 'r' is silent. Ironic thst he uses French in his examples when it has more dropped letters than most other languages.
Yeah, well there are some confusing things in the video: the French word for plumber is plombier (which has a b that is pronounced), as @ebronken points out. The same with the word "subtle" which is "subtile" in French.
@@elgur4512 You're quite right. All the words in English derive from Indo-European. Screw this "French" and "Latin" bullshit.
That was sarcasm, in case you missed that.
@@bornhoffer Didn't Gideon put up a different word for the Old French, though?
Not gonna lie, I overlooked the length of this video and thought it would be at least 28 minutes long because if the title. I'm glad I was wrong. Thanks for such a helpful video!
Thank you for this explanation, the old Indonesian spelling we have silent letter, but we changed it in the modern Indonesian spelling, to make easy the learner to understand the voice and spelling with same logical.
That sounds like a good idea!
I have yet to watch one of your videos and think I knew any of it. You are clearly well informed, well read and well… interested. This was no exception and we clearly don’t know a shard (euphemism) about where our language originated. Thank you for everything so far and I (most definitely) look forward to more.
It's probably already written below, but "subtle" in French still has a b - "subtil". Same for "plumber" - "plombier".So for French spealers, English spelling of both words is rather easy :) "Isle" also had an "s", but this has been replaced by a "^" as you explained in another video.
I've seen a video that said French spelling was also screwed up by scholars, and for the same reason.
..but those are not silent letters...
@@louisavondart9178 they are.
Isle is still a perfectly cromulent English word.
yeah, but for some or no reason, he was harking to old english. i guess
No dout this is one of the best RUclips channels.
Howdy from Texas!! 1:52 is a great example of American / Canadian vs. British English. In American and Canada, the past tense of spell is spelled - both in written and spoken form. In England, both spelled and spelt are acceptable; however, to my American ears, it hurts to hear. Great video content and the most interesting comments section ever typed!
Hearing the actual reasoning behind things makes it a lot easier to understand than some stupid rule. I love that this channel explores those things.
Very interesting! I teach English and I'm often asked by my students what's the reason for those silent letters.. and I didn't know about those annoying scholars.
Elisheva, don’t be fooled. This is wholly inaccurate.
@@andrewjonathan5630 can you explain?
@@elishevak.8637 Here in comment section I found a more sensible explanation: they are there to link the words with it's roots and derivatives:
Receipt - reception
Doubt - dubious
@@ko71k52 That same comment also said maybe this is a reason. They didn't know, but simply put forth the theory. Just because something seems to make sense doesn't mean it's right. Renaissance scholars made these decisions, and modern scholars are the ones who actually have the knowledge to claim something was a certain way, not someone who'd barely even wondered about this before seeing the video on their feed.
I got put out of so many English classes for asking these questions or correcting the teachers so thank you for this I think I'll look up some old teachers to send them a link.
By the way, Rob, I stumbled into your channel, and really appreciate such a nice, concise lesson. I have subscribed so I shan't miss new videos.
I see the trouble with that spelling. But the trouble is already inside the French spelling. There are so many irregularities, that for me as an Austrian, who speaks different languages and had Latin at school, sometimes it has been easier, when learning English, to recognize a read word with this latinised spelling. Of course only in the cases where it is genuine.
And for someone who has no romanic basis and no foreign words deriving from Latin, learning English must be hard (French aswell by the way).
Would you make a video about the pronunciation for the letters 'OO'? Why are there so many exceptions from the general rule? We have 'cookie', but we also have 'door', 'flood', all pronounced differently :) Love your videos! Thank you!
Cookie and flood are pronounced differently, as you should know if you have gone through the door and entered a school. And don’t eat food from the floor.
@@yugandali Thanks for that, I'm in a good mood now 👍
The original is on 'door'
like a really long 'oh'
this is related to the Great Vowel Shift(s), of the Renaissance and early modern periods. You can look it up on Wikipedia for a full list. Some changes weren't 'complete' so you got these exceptions.
Say these two words: Route and router. Is it pronounced Root and rooter? Or Raoot and raooter? Or a mix? Answer varies between regions. Not dialects, because even within the same dialect you see either. It's very town-to-town.
Scots didn't go through the full change for instance so in Scots the words Brown Cow are pronounced like in olden times, broon cooh. Before, almost every OW and OU was like a modern OO, while the old OO was like the modern OH. You can see Shakespear rhyming Throne and One in one of his poems, for example.
Confusing, but such is English.
Wow, I never even realized how many different ways we say 'oo' in different words.
@@alonsoACR rawoot? what, with two different syllables? I highly doubt that anyone actually says it that way. if you mean pronouncing it to rhyme with 'doubt', however, sure.
Bill Bryson's book 'Mother Tongue' covers development of the English Language in great detail, though, if my memory serves me correctly, he places the correction of spelling in the mid-late 19th century when scholars on both sides of the Atlantic decided to codify spelling which, up to then, had been a little 'free form' and academic dictionaries were published to be used as the prevailing standard and this is when the silent letters were actually officially introduced with both nations' scholars taking a slightly different view. Hence the US dropped the 'u' from colour etc, while the UK retained it, also 'nite' and 'nght' for example and the US dropped the use of the 'double L' in, for example, 'traveller'. In the late 19th century English records, such as census forms, you can still see 'labourer' and 'laborer' spellings as well as other word variations. A very interesting and amusing book. So although the silent letters may well have appeared much earlier, spelling wasn't formally defined till the appearance of these 'new' dictionaries.
The silent B in "dumb" does have a special use for identification.
I have just discovered your channel and am addicted. It's fascinating learning of the origins of these weird spellings and word usages that I've grown up taking for granted and not understanding or questioning. I am currently learning Japanese which has its challenges, but now I can see that leaning English must be a nightmare for non native speakers. Thanks for your great work.
the daughter took Japanese in H.S. but might take Korean in college -- the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only scientifically designed alphabet
( there are some pronunciation rules that blur over standardized Korean spelling, but that is the fault of the language, not the alphabet )
in the '80s I heard about 2 German school boys who taught themselves Hangul
to pass notes in class, using it to spell their own language...
@David Bork Kana is also phonetic... Aside from 2 letters... That are also not phonetic in Romaji. At least not the one without the ō, ū and all that jazz. Generally, the point of different pronunciations in the Japanese language, is to change the meaning. For example: 生(U) is for 生まれる(Umareru: To be born), 生(Nama) is for Raw/Fresh, and 生(Sei) for 人生(JinSei) Life, specifically, personal life(Not as in private, but as in, a person's life). The language is far more poetic than you think.
I'm extremely pleased to have stumbled upon your channel, and have subscribed. Please continue to produce such informative and enjoyable content. The "inkhorn controversies" provide much amusement as well as perfectly legitimate irritation.
I agree. There are some very illogical placements of certain letters within specific words.
I do like that Dette still has silent letters, which you handwave away as perfectly reasonable silent letters 😂
I find such quirks surprisingly useful for making intuitive connections with other words. For example, the silent 'b' in 'doubt' makes it very easy to make a connection with the word 'dubious'. It's these intuitive connections that make us fluent. In absence of such subtle clues, we would have to rely solely on repetition to burn the connections into our minds. I don't think these changes would have survived if they weren't useful.
What a fascinating contrarian defense. Yes, it is easy, and even fun, to poke one's finger at these Renaissance scholars as if they were pompous meddlers. And yet this is not really fair, they were concerning themselves with something more than pronunciation: etymology. And this seems to me justified due to the unified linguistic heritage of Europe as well as the fact that, in English at least, fidelity to pronunciation has turn out to be such a fool's errand (e.g., the pronunciation of "ough," which he discusses in another video).
They are also very useful in providing a spelling that means just one word that can't be confused with another. For example, sign (see post below from KingOfScilly and resulting comments): if you spell this using the usual form for words pronounced similarly (wine, swine, twine), it's the same as sine; and you can't drop the "e" signifier for a long vowel because it would be a sin. (Sorry!) I think you are quite right (not rite) to point out that anomalies stay around because they are useful. Purely phonetic spelling does not work for English, which has an abundance of monosyllables and thus homophones that need to be distinguished one from another.
Well to us frenchspeaking folks it is perfectly clear that 'doute' and 'dubitatif' have the same root. We don't need your mute b as a reminder.
@@frenchimp Well, not so clear IMO, hence the "dans le doute" expression which tends to replace more and more the "dubitatif" adjective. You need to know that the modern french verb "douter" comes from latin "dubitare" to understand why "dubitatif" is the related modern french adjective, and not some other word like "doutif". And... it seems like "doutif" was actually used in middle french, so maybe our own Renaissance scholars chose to alter french with latinisms, like english scholars did.
@@frenchimp Maybe so, but it was only a simple example to illustrate the point. In any language there are tens of thousands of words, some more obscure than others, so even native speakers keep expanding their vocabularies. Besides, French does a similar thing with the circumflex which marks the now absent 's' in words like hôpital or château. I don't think the guys at the Académie Française left these marks for the benefit of ignorant foreigners like me, who might otherwise never realize that "château" and "castle" are cognates. I guess it must be useful even at higher levels of fluency and with more obscure words, even if you don't consciously think about it.
For an Italian like me "doubt" is natural, because in my mind I see Latin root.
At least... someone sane in this threat, thank you to clarify what should be obvious for everyone to see! I find his explanation horribly misleading.
Franglish would have it be doute, English however wanted to have germanic twist on the latin word so yeah, doubt.
Brazilian, same as you.
Yes, I also like the silent letter added based of etymology, makes it easier to know the meaning.
In Spanish we sometimes use the adjective "dubitabundo" to describe someone who is mulling things over too long before making a decision, and "dubitativo" for something that expresses doubt.
Learners of English struggle with these words. One of my friend’s parents who were from Italy, had lived in the UK for decades and couldn’t master complex English spelling and pronunciation. When people say English is easy they need to consider this aspect of the language.
I'm so stressed out. But your videos are comforting. I'd rather focus on Scholars being chaotic ninny's than my problems ATM. Thank you ❣️❣️❣️
I'm a native spanish speaker, but somehow i learned how to speak english well enough to teach it as a foreign language here, in the Dominican Republic. My students here really suffer with spelling, mainly because spanish is quite the opposite of english, in the sense that for spanish you spell practically the same as you hear it, very different story in english. When my students ask me why is spelling english so hard, the only answer i can offer is that is english is crazy. The simple answer. This video sort of proves that.
On the other hand English grammar is the soul of simplicity when compared to romance languages like Spanish.
@@percyfaith11 maybe french, as a spanish speaker i hardly see it as romantic
@@nicodemo3246 Well, blame the Romans then because that is where the term comes from, not from love.
The b in plumber is there for a good reason. It is plombier in French and the symbol for lead is Pb.
Yes, but the point is that it has been ADDED by English scholars, to make it conform to Latin. It came over to English as the Norman French without the "b". The ATILF says the word "plunmier" is attested in 1266 ... so at one stage in French the Latin "b" had become an "n". The "b" was added back into French in the 15th century.
You can doubt the existence of "B" in "doubt" but you have to respect the subtlety of "B" in "subtle".
The H in 'John' is another example of the same process. In Middle English the name is usually spelt 'Jon' or 'Jone' (or to be more exact 'Ion' or 'Ione', since I and J were then treated as one and the same), but in the sixteenth century the H was reintroduced as a nod to the Latin original, 'Johannes'. Sometimes those who used it did not quite know where to put it, so that we also find 'Ihon'.
Catalán actually pronounces all these silent letters!
Doubt - dubte (doob-teh)
Recipe - recepta (rey-sep-tah)
There are no silent letters in Recipe
Edit: oh wait you mean receipt
Not all of them: Island - Illa
@@juanausensi499 But in Spanish, the S is pronounced. I love languages.
Doubt is like dubious. Debt is like Debit.
Just because French doesn't have the letters doens't mean they don't have some logic.
As you said, they were reinstated or added by old scholars who saw these relationships. I'm not quite as annoyed because i like hints that words are similar even if not from similar origin.
Loved the video! Shared with my 12 year old daughter who’s been asking just this!
The word plumber is derived from the Latin word for lead - plumbum. Early plumbers worked with lead, hence the name. Plumb bobs, which were used to ascertain a vertical line, were derived similarly, since the weight at the end of the string -the bob - was made of lead.
This is exactly the kind of detail I LOVE. What a brilliant channel! I’m hooked! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
I figured it had something to do with Latin roots but who would have ever imagined that this had been done deliberately? Sneaky scholars!
I actually admire them for pulling this off!
I’ve started sharing your videos-which I discovered only today-with my students who are French.
This channel will help me answer a whole lotta side questions on the erratic English language😁
Excellent job! Thank you so much!
I am new too and have fallen very hard for this great channel but you said it better than I could !!
Educating others and actually penetrating through evil ignorance to the brilliance of a communicated idea fully realized and seeing the comprehension dawn in other peoples eyes is pure MAGIC to me.
Does'nt happen often but when it does.....
@@palmereldrich Beautifully put!
Ever since I was a teenager, I have been interested in languages and their origins. When I took German in school, I noticed how most of their words are spelled phonetically. The same for Swedish and Norwegian. Their rules for phonetic spelling may differ somewhat, but once you learn the simple rules it becomes very hard to misspell a word. With that in mind, I have wondered why we have some letters that have two different sounds. Like the letter "G". It can sound like the "g" in good or the "j" sound in George. The Letter "C" can have the "k" sound or the "s" sound. I propose we limit one letter to one sound. Cat should be spelled "kat" and city should be spelled "sity", or perhaps "sitty".We could give the letter "c" a new sound, that of "ch" as in "cheese". Of course then cheese would be spelled "ceez". "Geez" would be spelled Jeez and geese would be spelled gees.
Doubling a vowel would make it long, and a single vowel within a word would make it short.
Now what to do about "wood" and "would". Well, we'll have to figure that out later.
You might as well start writing Dutch
You're 100% right and I've been hearing of people proposing this since I was a kid, but it never seems to get traction. Maybe they're afraid of every pre-existing book becoming incomprehensible to the next generation. Of course you could re-write them, but it would be a monumental undertaking.
So far every proposal for spelling reform has proven to just make another mess. The problem is, English has way more sounds than there are letters in the Latin alphabet, and there's too much historical baggage attached to the old alphabet. George Bernard Shaw realized the problem and proposed that we create a new alphabet, one not based on the Latin one, where every sound gets its own letter. This was done and it's called the Shaw or Shavian alphabet. Of course it languishes in obscurity.
Then, you'd have a Scandinavian language.
@@sherrillsturm7240 No, you’d have a slightly more logical spelling system for English.
I have wondered for years why there were so many silent letters in words. Now it makes sense.
Whenever theres silent letters the answear is always France, thats all you ever need to know.
“The cold light of day and the heat of the night make me wonder if language has turned out quite right.”
- The Jazz Butcher
As an ESL teacher in Thailand, I'm asked about these silent letters often, because young Thai students learn phonics from their Thai teachers. When asked about the 'b' and the 'p' etc., I can only respond with "Those are there to punish you for not studying enough."
As an Indian,I simply tell students that English is the most stupid language given by the Colonial rulers to us.
3:00 This is particular annoying for scandinavians, as Iceland is spelled "Island" in the nordic languages (is = ice)!
This is the most interesting comments section I've ever read! Well done! Yall are very smart people....
I just discovered your channel and an enjoying it a lot.
Well I am sure glad we did not have such over zealous scholars in The Netherlands since Dutch is mostly (apart from some foreign words) phonetic and I can read any word in Dutch quickly and accurately letter by letter. Now you now why the so called "spelling bee" where Children are asked to spell words in English in a competition is unknown in countries that have languages that are phonetic...
Plot twist: When the printing press was brought to England, the employees that came with it were Dutch and spelled some words however they thought sounded correct, like "tough," and this just made things even tougher!
I like your point _'Now you now why the so called "spelling bee" where Children are asked to spell words in English in a competition is unknown in countries that have languages that are phonetic...'_ 😀 Is it actually true? 🤔
I understand why people resist change, but spelling seems the _least_ important aspect of English. Further, The English Spelling Society identify evidence that English-speaking students need significantly longer to achieve mastery of English than children learning more logical and consistent languages ①. George Bernard Shaw proposed a phonetic 40+ letter alphabet (Shavian alphabet) for English, but it got little support. 😞 His idea was to use completely distinct letters to avoid confusion. That also allows the systems to co-exist. So people would not need to change the spelling of their names, place names, companies, etc.
Changing the English spelling system should free up time which may be more usefully used by children (and adults) on other activities.
I'm with David Mitchell _The Best of David Mitchell on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown_ ruclips.net/video/pHtFkv9gpCQ/видео.html until 1m47s
Best wishes. ☮
① From The English Spelling Society web site on the "economic-and-social-costs-of-english-spelling":
_... a cross-European team led by Professor Philip Seymour from Dundee university which investigated literacy acquisition rates in 13 languages concluded in 2003 (British Journal of Psychology): "Children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. ....The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow."_
Pronouncing Dutch words can be a little challenging though.😂
@@alex-E7WHU 😂🤣 Is there an every-day (short😀) sentence which I might use to impress people if I could pronounce it correctly? I visited the Netherlands quite a lot in the '90s. I worked with a company in Eindhoven.
Best Wishes. ☮
@@gbulmer I worked near Utrecht for some years.. some things sounded like someone gargling with gravel 😂
Spelling contest makes no sense in my language. Everything is pronounced as it is written - except some historical names.
Very interesting, I wasn't aware of this. The Thai language is horrible for including unnecessary consonants in the spelling of many words. With loan words, the Thai spelling will try to follow the spelling used in the original language that the word came from - English, Pali, Sanskrit, etc. It would make much more sense to drop this protocol and just to use a phonetic spelling. English too, which is very difficult to learn as a second language.
Even when the words are simple and straightforward to spell, it's far too common to see misspellings almost anywhere I go online.
Very informative and nice to know. I have read that early printing in England was done by the Dutch and they were paid by the number of letters used so also added letters to English words.
Thank whoever decided not to let the Germans do the printing. There is a reason that Scrabble was not invented there, the board would be 200 by 200 squares.